In the beginning, movies were about motion, not emotion. The young medium mainlined the thrill of thundering waterfalls, iron horses roaring down the rails and dancers undulating with fans. This new element of visual culture awed, challenged and sometimes aggravated artists.
Film-art fraternization achieved notoriety in Warhol’s Factory but flourished in celluloid’s infancy. So did competition for the public eye. These plots play out on 44 screens wall-mounted with artworks from 1880 to 1910 in MOVING PICTURES: American Art and Early Film. The traveling show has made its last stop at the Phillips Collection.
Produced by the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts, this artful edu-tainment exposes cross-fertilization between film entrepreneurs such as Thomas Edison and artists such as Thomas Eakins. These screen gems span natural wonders to boxing matches to seaside frolics. The first films were shown on personal cabinet viewers called kinetoscopes, modeled by Edison on phonograph technology. The big-screen Vitascope debuted in the mid-1890s — ushering in the box office age.
In supporting roles are vintage movie posters (“Life-like motion!”), newspaper accounts (“42 Feet of ‘KISS’ in 600 Pictures!”) and flip books — check the clutch of clips accompanying Edison’s once-scandalous, now charmingly comical 1896 short “May Irwin Kiss.”
Among artifacts in this illuminating social study: 1894 ads portraying cinema as a refined cultural and John Sloan’s 1905 “Fun, One Cent” etching of the movie parlor as a seedy escape for the working class; Sloan’s derision of moving pictures as vulgar “peep” shows smacks of jealousy as one moves throughout the exhibition, witnessing the crude silent clips’ ability to steal the thunder of same-subject paintings and prints by Sloan and his peers. Compare the allure of the film and painted beach-bather scenes. Refinement could not keep alock on the visual culture.
The romance of cinema prevailed, but the appeal of landscape paintings endured. Consider William Morris Hunt’s 1878 panoramic oil “Niagara Falls,” which holds its own against the Cinémagraphe Lumière’s “Niagara, Horseshoe Falls” from the same year.
Stars of the show include stop-motion experiments from Eadweard Muybridge, who in the 1870s and 1880s created the sensation of animation from sequential images of galloping race horses, whirling dancers and athletes jumping hurdles. When spun, his “Zoopraxiscope” plates of tiny pictures create the illusion of motion.
The Edison Company’s productions for its projection inventions included “Eugene Sandow.” Diminutive by today’s steroidal standards, this “Modern Hercules” works that body in silence. Counterpoints include a series of male nude stills by Eakins, better known for tamer paintings of sophisticates.
City in Motion selections contrast early 20th-century impressionist and filmed urban sightings. The early 20th-century Ash Can school, for example, painted cinematic drama into realist images of bridges and barges. The gritty scenes come to life on the adjacent screens.
Fascinating juxtapositions include Edwin Austin Abbey’s photogravure “Galahad at the Siege Perilous” — which inspired D.W. Griffith to script an unproduced epic — side-by-side with Edwin Porter’s 1904 “Parsifal,” a big-buck film opera adaptation employing trick effects.
The exhibit reminds us that what became taken for granted and consequently caffeinated with sex, violence and raw language began as a vehicle that thrilled viewers by simply capturing the real-world action and the motion of daily life.
Rather than drama, these mostly unscripted, proto-reality shows turned their lens on “modern poetry,” unleashing the magic of our existence We see the film set of Lumière’s 1895 “Feeding the Baby” echoed in Mary Cassatt’s 1896 drypoint/aquatint “The Barefooted Child. For a quirkier attempt, look for “Afternoon Wind,” an oil painting outshone by the flickering “Nymph of the Waves,” an 1896 cinematic confection from American Mutoscope. Artists mined the new medium for fresh ideas. For the masses, film’s perceptional evolution spawned a new visual dialect.
One-upping dinner and a movie, Moving Pictures offers a rare treat: Experiencing visual culture through fresh eyes.
MOVING PICTURES: AMERICAN ART & EARLY FILM
On view through May 20
» Venue: The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW
» Info: 202-387-2151; phillipscollection.org
» Related events: Artful Evenings gallery talks include “Real to Reel – New Technologies and Public
Entertainment 5 to 8:30 p.m. March 1
